As a side note..
Before 2004, I didn’t *have* any debt. At all.
I suppose in some ways it’s good.. when I’ve paid it all off, I’ll have a record of having paid it all off, which will mean I can qualify for a car loan – which I will get, and then pay off the next day, so I can then qualify for a home loan – which, after I’ve saved for about two years, I’ll have enough for a down payment and $BANKING_SYSTEM will then own my soul.. wait a second, do I really want to do this…?
I’m undecided about home “ownership”. Among other things, I wouldn’t actually own it until I’m 50, and in the meantime it would be one more thing for $THE_MAN to hold over my head. And even if I owned it outright, the government could decide they want to seize it – right now they only do that for drugs, but how long before they do it for saying the wrong things? I mean, yes, that’s paranoid, but..
On the other hand, if I owned it, I could modify it to my tastes without worrying about a exact ‘undo’ procedure for when the landlord got it back.
Third hand, though, I’d like a bigger house than I can ever afford in Orange County.. but I really like California..
Hm. Maybe I’ll win the lotto.
May 15th, 2007 at 8:19 pm
BTW congrats on the getting your debt (or soon to… ) as for home ownership… your thinking is off.. “owning” a house is different from most any other purchase you would ever make… A house generally goes up in value over a period of years… even if there is a slump… the value will usualy go up again (obviously if the neighborhood you are in goes from normal suburbs to slums with lots of violence, it could stay down in value)… regardless, it’s an investment if after two years of owning a house you decide you don’t want to live there any more, then you can usually get back what you paid for (including closing costs and crap), if not more…
Also, when you reach that age of 50 (or if you go for a 15 year loan, before then)… you will own something that is worth a LOT of money… and if you buy in an area that becomes more valuable faster then other areas in the country, then you can sell that house and buy a MASSIVE house somewhere else…
blah blah blah…
May 15th, 2007 at 8:57 pm
Re: property forfeiture, how about making copyright infringement a federal crime meaning it could lead to life imprisonment and seizure of property used in and associated with such crimes?
November 1st, 2007 at 6:19 am
Yea… You can always fight a forefeiture, or let the event radicalize you (i.e. if they take my house away, they will be sorry, so they better not, because I will win in the end one way or another).
But to be serious, it’s good stuff. My grandparents bought a house and lived in it for 30+ yrs, My parents are on their 5th house, which they got by selling their 4th house and pooling it with my grandparent’s house — it’s worth $800K or so and they dropped $150K or so on my sister’s $500K house (Which isnt’ really fair because she makes tons of money off the “investment” while I don’t. The same amount of money would have PAID OFF my house.) My point being is that nobody at any point in ownership of any of these houses ever made more than $55,000 in a year, yet it’s all worth well over a million now. And my $141K house is now $500K . . . in about 10 yrs.